New Trends in Air Traffic Complexity

This paper describes a novel approach for defining an air traffic complexity indicator, aimed at improving over the current operational definition that is only the num-ber of aircraft present in a sector at a given time. The key concept in this work is that a level of disorder or equivalently unpredictibility is the right indicator. Our approach is relevant for many applications in the air traffic management area, like sector design ([2]), traf-fic assignment ([1, 3]) and will be very well suited for predicting complex situations in a future autonomous aircraft environment. Moreover, since this modelling takes explicitely into account the trajectories of the air-craft, either observed or planned, it fits perfectly with 4D based ATM like SESAR or NextGen